Adding time to social movement diffusion

ABSTRACT

There is now a substantial literature on the diffusion of protest events, tactics, identities, and frames between locations and among movements. This paper asks how the patterns identified in this literature may change as the time scale of diffusion extends across single cycles of protest and beyond the life spans of individual activists. I focus especially on two types of differences: the changing weight of relational and non-relational channels of diffusion; and ways in which, over longer stretches of time, the mediation of diffusion by formal organizations, institutions, and public history works to filter the influence of past activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• diffusion
• time
• comparative-historical sociology

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Katherine Mooney, Paul Almeida, Kevin Gillan, John Krinsky, Kevin Lewis, Isaac Martin, Tad Skotnicki, Cecelia Walsh-Russo, and Social Movement Studies reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Traugott’s treatment of what we might now call urban riots is an instructive contrast to Myers’ (2000) account. For the time scale of Myers’ study, it makes sense to consider mechanisms of diffusion that involve direct knowledge of riots elsewhere. For the several centuries covered by Traugott, it becomes necessary to ask how the meaning of a riotous activity comes to congeal in political and literary cultures and, in that way, can persist even through long periods of quiescence.

2. As Gillan (2017) points out, these components of social movements may change (or diffuse) at quite different rhythms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Haydu

Jeffrey Haydu teaches at the University of California, San Diego. He studies labor and food movements in comparative and historical perspective.